When the first public transatlantic phone service came into operation

It took five decades following the invention of the telephone before the first public intercontinental phone service came into play on 7 January 1927.

Britain’s General Post Office (from which today’s BT is descended) and America’s Bell Labs (now AT&T) used wireless/radio communication for a conversation between Bell president Walter S Gifford in New York and Sir Evelyn Murray, secretary of the General Post Office, in London.

The GPO’s transatlantic radio telephone service was run from Rugby Radio Station – at the time the world’s largest radio station – which BT is only now closing, with the former industrial site being redeveloped for housing and community use.

As with all breakthroughs, intercontinental communication came after the scaling of a series of intermediate hurdles. The first transatlantic telegraph communication, for example, took place way back in 1858 – when Queen Victoria sent a telegram to US President James Buchanan via an undersea cable laid between Ireland and Newfoundland. The cable, however, only lasted three weeks before failing. Thankfully, better and more efficient cables would be laid.

Where it began: the first transatlantic service was run from Rugby Radio StationCredit:
BT

During the early days of the First World War, Bell engineers provided an uplifting telecoms achievement with the first voice transmission across the Atlantic, connecting Virginia and Paris – albeit briefly and only one-way – in 1915.

In 1916, Bell’s engineers held the first two-way conversation with a ship at sea. The impact of war, however, applied limits on the availability of materials, which put this work on hold for another decade – the first two-way conversation across the Atlantic took place in 1926, preceding the public service launched a year later.

The GPO’s transatlantic radio telephone service was run from Rugby Radio Station, which BT is only now closing

Over the next few years, the service spread across North America and Europe. In 1929, the SS Leviathan became the first ocean liner to offer radio telephone service to its passengers and crew.

Further intercontinental telecoms milestones included the first call from the US to Tokyo in 1934. Then, a year later, AT&T managed the first round-the-world telephone call via the quirky device of the company’s president sitting in one room and sending a call on a circuit around the globe to chat to his vice president in another room in the same building.

For its first few decades of its existence, making intercontinental calls still required a bit of planning. That all changed when the UK ushered in international direct dialling (IDD) in 1963 – almost a century after the birth of the telephone.

The initial IDD service was only available between London and Paris until, in 1964, BT went on to connect Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester to a range of western Europe destinations. By this time, BT had laid the first transatlantic telephone cable (TAT1, in 1956), with AT&T’s Telstar satellite ushering in transatlantic satellite broadcasting and voice communications via BT’s Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, six years later, in 1962.

Dialling direct to the USA didn’t arrive until 1970 – and was limited to calls between London and New York. But a mere 10 years later, IDD was available to more than 90 per cent of UK phone customers, reaching nearly 90 countries. In 1988 BT was instrumental in the laying of the first transatlantic fibre-optic cable – a key driver in the development of the internet.

These days, very few overseas calls have to be placed via an operator. And the cost of calling has plunged, too. Adjusting for inflation, a call from the UK to New York has gone from around £1.60 a minute to 4p. Or free via internet services, of course.